Les Amours Imaginaires (Xavier Dolan, 2010)

An infallible formula for an easy and fresh comedy that launched the trendiest indie director of the moment Xavier Dolan.

Acclaimed and very well received by the youngest audience, Xavier Dolan can boast of bringing a breath of fresh air to contemporary cinema consecrating himself as a director at the age of 25. Today we revisit his second film, “Heartbeats” (“Les Amours Imaginaires, 2010) with which the director definitely reached international fame.

In “Heartbeats” friends Francis (Xavier Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) fall madly and stupidly in love with the same guy, Nicolas (Niels Schneider), an attractive young man who meets all the requirements to be cool: tall, handsome, blond, with a casual skater look, he smoked, drinks, lives alone and considers himself cultivated poet… He stirs up passions but disappoints as much as he promises. Francis and Marie, best friends at the beginning, fight for the attention of their new lover friends to the point that – as expected – their friendship is afflicted and finally broken. This familiar and fleeting suffering is reviewed by Dolan from a comical and relaxed tone, also achieved by inserting testimonies of other victims of the ”imaginary loves”. It is an imperfect but fresh film, a sort of “The Dreamers”(Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) badly written that appeals to the emotions and frustrations of new generations.

As for the how of the movie you can say that Xavier Dolan – director, producer, actor and supervisor for costume and art – has had the great ability to read his society and attract it with a new formula that converges both contemporary and vintage cool indie movement, with the conceptual and human emptiness of the incapable and bored youth. It’s a film served on a silver platter for cinephiles frustrated with contemporary cinema, a young provocative film that has been – perhaps in a exaggerated way – described as genuine.

Whether he is a genius or not, Xavier Dolan – who just released his (already) seventh movie “Mommy” (2014) – is the director on trend, the young promise. His career should be followed with the hope of finding not only new forms but also new contents that shall bring people back to cinema out of non-commercial artistic interests. Whether we may consider or not the proposal of the young Canadian director as valid, it is perhaps a good start to arouse contagion and give back to cinema the importance and prestige that it deserves.